Hello everyone and welcome back! Man! I can’t believe Gondras got it! What exactly? It’s the newest installment of the Final Fantasy XIII series, Lightning Returns! I know you’re wondering, Mari Blue Cat, aren’t you a Final Fantasy series fan? Yes I am but not a fan of the XIII series and I can see why. The thing is that Spoony on his show, “The Spoony Experiment,” reviewed the first of the trilogy and it was an entertaining review and of course, the game sucked!

As you know, Final Fantasy XIII is the only other game series that has sequels since X also had a sequel, unlike this series, it had two! I don’t get why it needed another sequel since the first game was basicallyunfinished and then XIII-2 came along and the weirdness continued, I bet you’re wondering for new people here, I shall recap!

The XIII Storyline: The first game in the trilogy takes place in Cocoon, which is a floating place, where the Sanctum is on a purge of people who came in contact with Pulse, which is the world below them, and Lightning, a soldier, goes and fight against the Sanctum and became an enemy due to her contact with Pulse as a servant by a god. She meets many other people who get marked by the same creature of Pulse to fight the Sanctum and find their assigned tasks before they turn into monsters, if they fail, or into crystal, if they succeed. I may link Spoony’s review to this game since the game was told in a sloppy way, which I can believe that and by what I heard by attendees during Anime Festival Orlando 2010. Now onto XIII-2, which Spoony will cover next, deals with the time space continuum and enters a new character known as Noel. This game’s story takes place three years after Cocoon’s fall onto Pulse and a meteor hits Pulse, which causes a disruption in time and monsters attack from different rifts within it. Sara, Lightning’s sister, gets attacked and Noel saves her and goes with him by traveling the timeline in order to find her. I got to see only the demo for this game which Gondras did play, he didn’t like it much and didn’t buy it, I can kind of see why since it does deal with choosing the idea of saving time or destroying it, which it gets destroyed anyways and of course brings in the game that got released a week ago!

The third installment deals with Lightning waking up after her crystal sleep of 500 years and finds out that she has to save the world within 7 days or it’s destroyed! Sounds familiar? Maybe people remember the game Majora’s Mask by any chance? Whoops, I mean thirteen days! She is deemed as the savior to help humankind by the three gods and Sara will be resurrected. Yeah, she died at the end of the second one. (Sorry, for the spoiler if anyone hasn’t finished any of the games.)

She does end up meeting up with old friends, like Hope who kept his teenage form, helps her with her quest and meets other friends she knew before and of course they have new roles in this game.

Gameplay: Unlike the fast paced game play in the first, this game’s play is mostly based on the Kingdom Hearts and XII game play, as in the role attack and the one on one fighting and facing the enemy. The gameplay was the true reason why Gondras got the game since he did play the demo on his PS3 and did play Dream Drop Distance on the 3DS when we first got it and know how to relate the two. Too bad XIII didn’t go through this since it wasn’t much of a good game for most people, which I did read on the Wiki for it that it was supposed to call back to the previous Final Fantasy games with the game play, but with Spoony’s review of the game it didn’t call back on it and it felt as though the game was controlling you, heck even at one point that Spoony referenced was that Hope talked about leveling up, as in you must do this or you will lose, unlike the previous games you just leveled up! Even if VIII monsters leveled up at the same time as you did, but still you just went and leveled yourself up knowing that the next enemy will be stronger than the last.

There was major call backs to the previous games and that was of course the job costume system that X-2 did with Yuna, as in the dress spheres! Which of course, like with Yuna, Lightning gets the costumes and the weapons that go with it, for example the Dragoon costume has the spear and armor calling back to IV with their many dragoons. And what is great, if you preordered this game, especially at GameStop, you get Cloud’s outfit from VII which has his sword, his outfit, and what everyone wanted since the first game of the trilogy, the classic fanfare victory theme, which is the same exact one from VII if you guys played it back then! That is not the only character costume you can get, for DLC, you can get Yuna’s outfit from X-2, which is the gunslinger outfit! I am not sure if it includes the fanfare from the X games, but this was a way of promoting the HD version they that is being released, unless if it already has!

Now the question, is this game worth it? For story no but gameplay yes! If you were a fan of the previous games, even if it meant playing hours of Blitz Ball in one and doing chocobo racing in another, you may or may not like this game since it came with the XIII title! Don’t get me wrong, Lightning is a great character but she was placed in a bad story, if you want to skip this trilogy and want to keep playing as Lightning, you can still play the second Disidea game, which has a great story, especially with her and how she interacts with Cain Highwind from IV! I do like the callback to VII with the Cloud outfit, but I don’t think it fits with this game since of course VII fits in a different storyline, but I am thinking creators want to callback to fave characters, if they did that, why isn’t Snow wearing the Kefka outfit from VI? Anyways, the gameplay is good, but at the same time it feels as though Square Enix has lost its touch with Final Fantasy when XII and this trilogy coming out. They did go back and fix XIV and now turning Vs. XIII into XV but giving the reigns of cration over to the creator of the Kingdom Hearts series, which I like the idea since the Kingdom Hearts series is a beautifully done game series and glad that the third one will finally be made but for the PS4!

If you guys want to buy this game, by all means, go ahed! Still, I love the old Final Fantasy games since I played a good majority when I had pretty good sight, but after seeing or shall I say hearing what is going on with this game, the story is somewhat improved but it could be better, goes the same with its predecessor games, as in the first and second XIII games!

So, what is next with my posts? My faves and not-so-faves of January and Febrary, yes I have not-so-faves! And then of course, my spotlight on MythiCon! Stay tuned and check out the link to Spoony’s review of the first game and most of us are waiting on his review of XIII-2 on his show!Spoony’s Final Fantasy XIII Review